Electronic medical records as “gold mines for medical research”

But the report neglected one powerful incentive for the switch to electronic records: the resulting databases of clinical information are gold mines for medical research. The monitoring and analysis of electronic medical records, some scientists say, have the potential to make every patient a participant in a vast, ongoing clinical trial, pinpointing treatments and side effects that would be hard to discern from anecdotal case reports or expensive clinical trials.

Yes! This is very important, and oft-ignored when talking about whether EHR’s are “working”. Whether or not there are immediate cost-savings due to increased efficiency/fewer duplicated tests, EHR’s are a huge potential data source for comparative effectiveness research, quality improvement research, and patient-centered outcomes research. Hopefully this research can improve quality (and perhaps lower costs).